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The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#501

Post by immibis »

0_____0 wrote: post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

This quote from The Expanse summarizes our society right now:

> Prax: They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply instead of the proper mineral solutions needed for long-term stability.

> Amos: That sounds bad.

> Prax: They'll only be able to get away with it for another week, maybe two. After that, the air, the scrubbing plants, what's left of them, will die off. When that happens, they won't be able to stop the cascade.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#502

Post by Ray20 »

saubeidl wrote: post #198
WalterBright wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?

It was a place where people lived good lives and had plenty of opportunities to succeed, along with free education and healthcare. I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.

>people live in misery.

People live in unimaginable luxury compared with what people had in Yugoslavia.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#503

Post by nradov »

palmotea wrote: post #458
WalterBright wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So they should act to strangle themselves faster? Come on.

Being relentlessly focused on the short term will do that, eventually. You seem to think the assumption "all companies die" means you can simplify away their journey, but it matters if they get there faster or slower (at least to society, if not the decision-makers to maximize their personal profit while hoping to not being the ones left holding the bag).

Old companies die and new ones take their place. This is not a problem for society. In most cases creative destruction is a net positive.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#504

Post by immibis »

badpun wrote: post #454
toomuchtodo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't. [1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025 [2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/poli…

Boeing stock price still almost doubled in the past 10 years. Went up by hundreds of percent in the past two decades. GE stock is worth 40x what it was worth 40 years ago, when Jack Welsh took over management! These two seem like two very successful companies, led by succesful strategies.

A lot of things did. Seems like prices much tend to rise faster than inflation.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#505

Post by whyowhy3484939 »

Jorchime wrote: post #391
softfalcon wrote: post #253

The hardest thing to do in life is to care. It's easy to not care, anything bad can happen and you can blissfully wash your hands of it. You don't care, so it doesn't matter. I remember being a teenager, my defense against anything bad that happened to me was, "I don't care" with a snide attitude. I was lying, I did care, but I built up a mindset that not caring about anything made me stronger. As an adult, I know th…

I wonder, how do you decide to care about something?

By experiencing the sheer existential horror that Nietzsche and others spoke of and coming out of it knowing the only way out is through. There is nothing to lean on. You decide you start caring and it will happen.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#506

Post by tines »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #368
gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket. The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find t…

Your list of examples is telling; all those things do indeed make life easy. But is easy equivalent to good? I don’t think so. People have more capabilities to connect, and have more “friends” than ever before, and people are more disconnected and lonely than ever before. Life is not good for a lot of people, despite being easier than ever for a lot of people.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#507

Post by [deleted] »

chrisco255 wrote: post #206
jplusequalt wrote: post #43

This is late stage capitalism at work. Our economy and political systems incentivized the behavior that lead us here, and the current apathy we see is the working class realizing the rot in the bottom of society.

There's no such thing as late stage capitalism. There's ebbs and flows, businesses that were formerly great (like newspapers), fade out and go out of business. New forms of media take their place, the cream rises to the top, the train keeps going.

[deleted]

Re: The Who Cares Era

#508

Post by immibis »

0_____0 wrote: post #57
sndean wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while. In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and…

I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there. They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility…

I think New Zealand tends to follow the same trends of cultural rot as the rest of the Western world, but years behind, and therefore a bit weaker too.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#509

Post by immibis »

superdude12 wrote: post #118
_lvbh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.

It’s different when in general the experience interacting with a government bureaucracy is poor, and government produces expensive and inefficient outcomes these days. As opposed to big tech which is creating huge profits and new technology.

Can you list several significant pieces of technology created since the iPhone?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#510

Post by porridgeraisin »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #468
porridgeraisin wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations). If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity. In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led pract…

“ you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest” I think most people want to have security and some predictability for their lives. One way to achieve this is by having money but there are other ways too. Reducing humans to purely economical beings who always want to maximize profit is a gross simplification that appeals to economists and bankers but it doesn’t reflect reality.

> reduce to purely economical

I didn't. Please read the multiple qualifiers I added to that phrase.

>> If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest.

What that means is that if you scale groups of people too much, the only common interest you'll find among _all_ of them will be financial self interest. Hence GCD - "greatest common divisor". Of course people do things without monetary incentives. But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does.

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